Robert Polding's Home

Derek Thompson recently wrote an essay arguing that “everything is television.” Meta’s Instagram is now 93% strangers watching videos. Podcasts are racing to add video. Even AI tools are pivoting toward generating visual content. The pattern is unmistakable: the internet is becoming a continuous stream of episodic video.

As someone who has spent two decades in technology education, watching students’ attention migrate from one platform to another, I find this trend both predictable and revealing. But the interesting question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s why.

Following the Money

Cal Newport, in his recent blog post reflecting on Thompson’s essay, offers a straightforward answer: economic determinism. The combined online video and traditional TV markets are projected to reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. When you build out massive broadband and wireless infrastructure through public-private partnerships, as we did over the last two decades, you’ve essentially laid the perfect foundation for tech companies to compete for that trillion-dollar pie.

Meta, Google, and even OpenAI aren’t following some inevitable technological logic. They’re following the money. And honestly, you can’t blame them. A trillion-dollar market is too big to ignore.
This reframing matters because it undermines the narrative these platforms have spent years cultivating. Facebook and Twitter once positioned themselves as essential social infrastructure, a new public square that responsible citizens needed to participate in. That framing carried weight. It made opting out seem irresponsible, anti-social, even Luddite.

The Liberation of Seeing Clearly

But if these platforms are just TV, then the moral calculus changes entirely. We’ve always known how to relate to television: we can simply turn it off.

In my work with university students, I see the psychological burden that social media platforms impose. Many feel obligated to maintain a presence, to stay connected, to remain visible. The fear of missing out isn’t just about content, it’s about relevance itself. When platforms position themselves as fundamental social infrastructure, absence feels like exile.

But once we recognize that Instagram is essentially a video streaming service, that TikTok is just highly personalized television, that even podcast platforms are becoming video-first entertainment channels, we can stop treating them as obligations and start treating them as optional entertainment.

This doesn’t mean these platforms have no value. Television has value. Entertainment has value. But we don’t feel guilty about not watching every show, about canceling streaming subscriptions, about spending our evenings reading instead of watching. We exercise choice without anxiety.

What We Might Preserve

I do think Newport is right to note that not everything is becoming television. Books endure. Films remain films. Some corners of the internet still prioritize text, depth, and asynchronous conversation. These spaces exist, but they’re increasingly niche.

For those of us in education, this matters. The skills required to engage with long-form text, to construct careful arguments, to think deeply rather than react quickly, these aren’t just academic preferences. They’re cognitive capabilities that atrophy without practice. If the internet is becoming television, we need to be more intentional about creating and protecting spaces for different kinds of thinking.

The students I work with are extraordinarily capable, but they’re also products of their media environment. When everything is optimized for engagement through rapid visual stimulus, sustained attention becomes a learned skill rather than a default state. This isn’t a moral failing. It’s an adaptation to the incentive structures that trillion-dollar markets create.

The Freedom to Opt Out

Newport’s conclusion offers real liberation: “Once we realize that these companies’ apps are essentially glorified TV, we should feel more comfortable ignoring them.”

This isn’t a call to abandon all screens or to romanticize some pre-digital past. It’s permission to be selective, to recognize that these platforms are selling entertainment, not providing essential services. You can close TikTok the same way you can close Netflix. You can skip Instagram the way you skip cable news. You can let video podcasts exist without feeling obligated to watch them.

The internet promised to be something different from television: collaborative, participatory, intellectually expansive. In many ways, it failed to deliver on that promise, not because the technology couldn’t support it, but because the economics didn’t reward it. The trillion-dollar video market was always going to win.

But understanding why that happened gives us agency. We can choose differently, not by fighting against billion-dollar platforms, but by simply recognizing them for what they are and deciding how much of our finite attention they deserve.

That’s not opting out of the future. It’s opting in to intentionality.